


the way i left was not the way i planned

by ihopethatyouburn



Category: Homeland
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-31
Updated: 2020-05-31
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:12:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24463990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihopethatyouburn/pseuds/ihopethatyouburn
Summary: "A book, of course, has the added benefit of being a perfect cover to shield her from suspicion, to finally shake her Russian surveillance detail and set her up to develop assets. If she has to destroy every remaining shred of goodwill she has with the US intelligence community, at least she can benefit from it later.And wasn’t that what Saul taught her, that the long game was the most important thing above all else? That self-sacrifice was worthwhile if you later had something to show for it?"A reflection on motherhood, legacy, and Carrie's first few months in Moscow.
Relationships: Carrie Mathison/Yevgeny Gromov
Comments: 4
Kudos: 38





	the way i left was not the way i planned

**Author's Note:**

> I want to give credit where it’s due to olandesevolante’s fic titled "the hour from night to day" for making me think about why Carrie started to write her book. Go read that one too!
> 
> I'm also always thinking about this Jacob Clifton quote from his Television Without Pity recap of The Star, describing Carrie and Brody: "The boy who loved America so much he tried to burn it down, and the girl who loved America so much she set fire to herself."

Carrie’s entire first month in Moscow could be best described as slightly unhinged. She takes her meds daily, mostly, but every time she has a peaceful thought she’s hurled back down to earth with the reminder that she’s stuck. Even the faint whispers of mania are drowned out by the quiet buzz of panic that hasn’t gone away since she left the US for the West Bank, by the voice in the back of her head reciting the charges read against her at her FBI hearing. She’s glad that no one thinks it strange to see a woman alone at a bar downing vodka shots.

Her adrenaline is raging the first time she’s allowed out for a walk unaccompanied, several notches higher than it is when she’s in the field, the incomprehensible Russian around her turning to white noise as the streetlamps burn so brightly she gets a headache. No matter how sternly she tries to remind herself that she’s safe, her body still wants to flee. She wanders the residential district around her apartment in increasingly larger circles, mapping the area as any case officer would, walking for so long that she wears a hole in the sole of her favorite boots.

She’s staying in a GRU safe house for the time being, a fact that some of the GRU officers clearly resent. Soon after she arrives there, she can hear a young agent in the stairwell outside her apartment complaining to Yevgeny in English, presumably because he wants her to hear.

“Why does this CIA lady get an apartment in the middle of the city?” he whines. “I can’t even afford to live here with my family.”

Yevgeny responds in Russian, nothing she can understand, but his _watch it_ tone is unmistakable.

The agent either doesn’t hear the warning in his voice or chooses to ignore it. “What has she done that’s so great, other than ruin your operation with the American chief of staff and get Simone to testify against us all?” 

Yevgeny’s voice gets quieter, more measured, a swift dismissal. Carrie can only make out the name Anna Pomersantseva, but the younger agent’s hurried footsteps down the stairs indicate that the response was harsh. Carrie wonders if Yevgeny switched to Russian to protect her feelings, because he knew she was listening; she appreciates the thought, but really she just wishes she could understand what he said about her, how he’s defending her to his colleagues.

One perk of political asylum is that she has a Russian tutor come twice a week, provided to her by the GRU after a long interrogation that was thorough but ultimately much more comfortable than the first one she had a year ago. She’s excited about the tutor at first, hoping the lessons will give her a semblance of a routine, Maggie’s nagging advice about the baseline treatment for mood disorders echoing in her head. But her chest gets tight the first time she looks down at the foreign alphabet written out letter by letter, yet another reminder that she set fire to her entire life and her only option to build a new one is to gather the bricks together herself.

She finds herself wondering about Brody’s own flight from the US, trying to recreate in her head the old corkboard piecing together the more reputable sightings across the globe. A couple years have passed since she’s thought about him consistently; his resemblance to Franny eventually became a fact she flatly noted at certain angles. Carrie used to lay in bed wondering when the reminder of him would start to hurt less, negotiating what she would offer to the universe in exchange for a coherent answer when daycare parents asked innocent questions about Franny’s father’s whereabouts, but she stopped feeling sick to her stomach about it sometime during her time in Berlin. 

Now in Moscow, she recalls the months after Brody’s disappearance, and her desperate attempts to convince both the public and the intelligence community of his innocence. At the time, she was so laser-focused on exonerating him that she’d never actually taken the time to imagine his mental state. But she wonders now.

At what point did his panic attacks start coming? Did he have his first one on a crowded street like she does, her brain screaming _danger danger danger_ like the world’s loudest car alarm, stumbling across the cobblestones to sit down on some steps leading up to an apartment building while strangers walk past her crying? 

Did he also develop strange aches out of nowhere, like the tightness in her left hip that only fades when she takes a shower hot enough to leave welts? She complains about it to Yevgeny until he gives in and massages her leg late one night, his thumb digging into her muscle so hard she almost cries out, but relaxes happily when he finishes. 

Carrie has it better than Brody did; she knows this intellectually, tries to remind herself of it every time she gets an envelope full of cash, placed in her hands every two weeks by a cast of rotating GRU agents, every time her Russian tutor drags her on a walk around the city where she’s not being actively hunted, every time Yevgeny brings her food or books or a living room rug without being asked.

She has Yevgeny to sit with her as she spirals, a luxury Brody certainly did not have, and he comes every time she calls, even at ungodly hours of the morning. Carrie figures this out early on while she’s still negotiating her panic attacks, recalling the irritating singsong tone of a former therapist’s voice but not the actual advice about how to wait one out. She calls him at four in the morning, gasping for breath.

“Carrie?” He answers the phone after only a few rings, his voice tired but alert. “Are you okay?”

“I need you to come over,” she says shakily, her voice matching the quiver of the fingers she has stretched out in front of her face. “I really just –” She takes a deep breath to steady herself. “I feel terrible, and I need someone here.”

He gets there in twenty minutes with rough stubble on his chin and his hair sticking up haphazardly, and she starts sobbing at the sight of him.  
  
“What happened?” he demands. “What’s going on?” He settles next to her on the couch, tentatively reaching a hand out to rub her back. 

“I just realized,” she sobs, “that I’m stuck here.”

Yevgeny doesn’t argue with that, or point out that it’s her fault, or try to convince her that it’s for the greater good, for which she’s grateful. 

“I didn’t even see my family before I left. If I’d known I was really leaving forever, I would have done things differently. They were only a ten-minute drive away.” She knew the consequences of revealing Saul’s asset, of course, but at that time the possibility of a life in Russia had felt so far away, not like the suffocating reality she’s experiencing now. “I should have tried to say goodbye.”

Yevgeny mostly listens to her catastrophize in circles as she cries herself out, feeling wrung out like she just finished a ten-mile run through the Iraqi desert. 

“Sorry for making you come over like this,” she apologizes when she calms down, looking at the floor. “You don’t have to stay.” She wipes her eyes with the napkin that was lying on the coffee table from her dinner. 

“Carrie,” he says softly. The embarrassed part of her wants to push him out the door, but he’s looking at her with such care in his eyes that she can’t actually do it. He slowly reaches out to cup her chin in his hand, his thumb tracing her jawline.

“What?” she whispers back, hoarse. 

They move together into a greedy kiss, and Carrie feels the muscles in her shoulders relax at last. She breaks away, breathing heavily, and stands, pulling him up from the couch with her. She spreads her palm across his chest, and can feel his heart racing underneath his shirt.

Impatient, he leans down to kiss her again and then lifts her off the ground with one arm, stumbling the few feet to her room and laying her down gently on the bed. She lifts her chin to give him room to kiss her neck, closing her eyes for a second to savor the moment – _finally_ – before reaching down to unbutton his jeans.

+++++

For the first month or two, Carrie and Yevgeny dance around each other, testing the waters. At first, she’s alternately too angry and too despondent to be up for visitors after being granted asylum. She can tell he’s hurt by this, since he was the one who convinced the director of the GRU that she could be an asset worth protecting, but she’s barely keeping it together and knows he’ll survive without being praised. She likes the power trip in refusing his offers to drop by and makes mental notes of his tone each time she declines, disappointed, resigned, bitter. But increasingly, she finds she could use the quiet company and lets him come more often than not, glad for a distraction.

One night, he arrives just as she’s polishing off the last of her vodka, with his latest excuse for coming over: more books in English and a warning not to keep pissing off her Russian tutor.

“What did they say about me in the latest GRU debrief?” she asks as he takes a seat on the couch and props his feet up on the coffee table. 

“No suspicious behavior,” he recites back at her, imitating the head of the surveillance detail. He grins, searching her face as if trying to match the pre-determined appropriate level of relief with her reaction. 

Carrie just sighs and digs her finger into a hole in the arm of the couch. “Great,” she says flatly.

“That’s a good thing,” he prods. 

“I know,” she grumbles, petulant.

“Don’t do that to the couch,” he says, his jaw set in a now-recognizable _you’re being fucking cranky_ position.

“It had a hole in it already.” She’s testing him to see if he’ll bite, and he knows this, and she knows he knows. It’s just a nice reminder that she still has someone she can piss off.

“It’s a nice couch. Just don’t touch it.”

They’re both quiet for a moment. Carrie swirls the ice dregs around the bottom of her glass lazily. Yevgeny winces at the noise, but he doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t stop doing it.

“So what are you up to tomorrow?” he tries.

He asks her this every time they see each other, which she used to bristle at, thinking it was his way of keeping tabs on her, but Carrie slowly realized that it’s his way of encouraging her to get out of her apartment more. She shrugs, still anxious about how to fill up the days that mock her with their emptiness. She never spent much time fantasizing about fleeing to another country, but she certainly never thought it would be so boring. She’s starting to understand the half-assed construction projects her father began after he retired. Her energy is coming back after more than a month of sleeping twelve or more hours a night, and if someone handed her wood and a saw to stop her from pacing holes in the living room rug she’d probably take them. 

To fill the silence, he tells her about work, about a new restaurant by his apartment that’s supposed to be good, about an exhibit at the modern art museum he keeps pushing her to go to: laughably banal things that Carrie only half-believes apply to her. It’s still strange to think that she’s essentially free to move about the city however she pleases, instead of the square mile around her apartment she’s allowed herself. 

“Maybe we can go to the museum sometime soon,” she offers. He’s trying so hard, and she does want to check it out, if only to experience normal life again, getting annoyed at long lines and people taking iPhone photos of the art and spending too much money at the gift shop. “This weekend?” She’s not sure what day it is, and Yevgeny usually goes to work seven days a week, like she used to, so the fact that he came from the office isn’t a reliable indicator of anything. 

“Let’s do it,” he agrees, with a smile on his face. That doesn’t give her any clue about how far away the weekend actually is, but at least she has something to look forward to. 

He runs his hand along her thigh then, cocking his head in a silent question. Carrie smirks a little, the reason for his visit now obvious. _Why not,_ she thinks to herself, draining her vodka glass and climbing onto his lap. She has to kneel slightly so she’s tall enough to kiss him, but they’ve figured out a rhythm by now, with his hands woven deep in her hair, pulling just hard enough so that she sighs happily into his mouth.

+++++

As Franny’s birthday approaches in late August, Carrie’s carefully constructed outer shell of calm starts to crack. Last year, while she was captured, she hadn’t been able to keep track of the date, a fact she’s now grateful for, if only because she was able to escape the guilt. Franny will be five years old, and Carrie can’t stop watching mothers on the street walking hand in hand with their children in ballet costumes, holding art projects, chattering away happily. 

Carrie doesn’t recall much about Franny’s actual birth, a fact that she’s also grateful for, but she does remember the all-consuming anxiety that overtook her the few weeks before her delivery, past the heightened thrill of a new challenge. She’d scheduled her delivery for early September, but Franny came a couple weeks early. Her own OB was in emergency surgery, so a thankfully businesslike resident performed her C-section instead, with minimal gushing about the wonders of childbirth. Maggie was there to squeeze her hand and give a know-it-all rundown of everything as the surgery progressed, but the details are hazy since Carrie kept asking the anesthesiologist to up her “light” sedation.

What she does remember clearly, of course, is the labor and delivery nurse who looked at Franny in her little hospital bassinet and cooed loudly, “Congrats, mama! And where’s dad?” 

Carrie glared at her. _Dead_ , she almost said, exhausted past the point of reason, but lost her nerve at Maggie’s sudden tight grip on her arm. “He’s not here,” is all she managed. 

Maggie then ushered the nurse out of the room, babbling desperately about pillows and ice chips to get her to go away, which was the most helpful thing she did all day. She left Carrie alone to gaze at her sleeping daughter with an equal mix of awe and terror, a tiny person she made that she was then responsible for keeping mentally and physically intact.

Around Moscow, Carrie makes note of all the girls bearing even a passing resemblance to Franny, idly wondering how the little girl in the park holding hands with her blonde mother and brunette father got her red hair. Her heart rate speeds up as she realizes that people probably have the same thought about Franny, looking for resemblance in Maggie and Bill. She feels possessive all of a sudden, from 5,000 miles away, the same way she used to at Franny’s daycare in Berlin when people assumed Jonas was her father. It was the source of her first big knock-down drag-out fight with Jonas, who took issue with how quickly Carrie would correct people that he wasn’t the father, just the boyfriend. 

Yevgeny notices her brooding after a few days. He brings it up while they’re sitting at an outdoor cafe, Carrie mostly ignoring his chatter in favor of watching a three-year-old eat a roll a few tables away. She’s a continent and an ocean away from her daughter, but her brain sees any child vaguely in Franny’s age range as a reminder.

“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong?” he asks.

“What do you mean?” Carrie raises her eyebrows innocently, buying herself time as she decides how truthful she wants to be. 

“You know what I mean,” he responds about her apparent disinterest in anything he’s said in the past five minutes. “You’ve been quiet for days. You waved at two babies this morning, which I’ve never seen you do. You hate sitting near babies because they might start crying loudly.” 

Her first instinct is to lie, but she decides at the last minute it isn’t worth it. Carrie is still getting used to how closely Yevgeny watches her, and vacillates between being flattered and annoyed, between being happy someone is paying attention and furious that he should presume himself an authority on her. He’s right though, as usual, and so Carrie lets him in:

“It’s Franny’s birthday next week. She’s turning five.” Even as she says it, Carrie’s working to keep her voice level, downplay her hurt in case he files it away for later. She’s been in Moscow for a few months already, and for the most part her guard is down around Yevgeny, but the case officer in her is still over-cautious when it comes to Franny. 

He nods thoughtfully. “I figured it was something about your daughter.” Carrie isn’t sure why but she’s glad he didn’t use her name, which feels too personal somehow, while she’s still deciding how much of herself she’s offering to him. “Which date next week?”

On the morning of the 27th, the following Wednesday, he drops by her apartment with a pastry from her favorite bakery. “Today’s her birthday, right?” he asks as he hands her the plastic container, rubbing her shoulder gently. 

Carrie nods, tears springing to her eyes automatically. “Thanks for thinking of her,” she says, squeezing his hand in return. She puts it on the kitchen counter to eat later. “Do you want coffee?” she offers as a distraction, digging around in the cabinet for her espresso tin. 

“Sure,” Yevgeny says as he settles into a seat at her kitchen table, opening the Russian newspaper he insists on getting a paper copy of every morning.

He looks briefly at the pastry sitting on the counter, but seems to think better of saying anything else. When he leaves for work thirty minutes later, she eats it over the sink to catch the crumbs, swallowing so fast she doesn’t even really taste it. It’s a nice gesture from him, if an obvious one, testing how vulnerable she’ll allow herself to be.

That night, she has a version of the dream that’s been recurring over the last few months: she’s in a room with several doors, all of which are locked from the outside. Every time, there’s something she needs to get right outside one of the doors, a flash drive, a key, a phone that won’t stop ringing. Tonight, though, she can hear Franny calling from outside the room, her voice moving from door to door and eventually crescendoing to sound like she’s yelling from all sides, with Carrie running to each door in turn and shouting back fruitlessly. 

She wakes up sweaty with her shirt twisted around her torso, a telltale sign that she’s been thrashing around. 

“Are you okay?” Yevgeny’s awake too, his hand on her arm. 

She jumps a little at his touch. “I’m fine,” she tries to assure him, but her heart is beating so fast he can probably hear it. “I was just dreaming.”

“The same dream you’ve been having?”

“No,” she says shortly. “This one was different.”

She turns on her side away from him and tries to calm her breathing. He turns too so they’re two open parentheses, not touching but close enough that Carrie can feel his body heat. She tries to time her breaths with his, embarrassed at the way hers hitch in her throat. Yevgeny just whispers, “Okay. Sleep well,” and leaves her alone with her racing thoughts.

+++++

The all-consuming thoughts of Franny don’t subside when her birthday passes. Carrie finds herself wondering if she likes her new teacher at school, and if she actually likes her violin lessons or if Maggie is making her take them. She wants to know where Franny thinks she is, and if she thinks she’s coming back. If Franny even wants her to come back. 

Carrie remembers the day Franny first asked about her father, coming home from a day at preschool where everyone drew pictures of their families. Carrie smiled to see stick figures of her and Franny holding hands, with three smaller figures she assumed were Maggie and Bill and Josie in the background. 

“All my friends asked if I have a dad,” Franny said. Carrie sighed heavily, knowing this might be coming but silently cursing those nosy four-year-olds. 

“And what did you tell them?” Carrie asked, stalling.

“I said I have my mom and Aunt Maggie.”

Carrie nodded seriously, wishing that all her worrying about this eventual question had helped formulate a helpful answer.

“That’s exactly right,” she said. “All families are different, like how your friend Sophia has two dads. So our family is me, and Aunt Maggie, and Uncle Bill, and we all work together to be parents.” 

Franny seemed appeased with this answer. “Sophia’s dads are nice. They let me have two desserts when I went to her house.” 

At the time, Carrie exhaled, glad to have avoided further questioning about Brody. Now, she wonders if Maggie talked to Franny about him during the year that Carrie has been away. And if she was included in subsequent family drawings.

After her own mother left, Carrie spent weeks reviewing the first eighteen years of her life in her head. Not so much to figure out where she went wrong, or how she could have convinced her mother to stay, but as a catalog, so she wouldn’t forget anything important. She’d always taken after her father, but in ways that in hindsight were tinged with mania: the most competitive kid on her soccer team, the most daring kid at the lake, letting her dad talk her into climbing up a bare rock face. Despite that, she used to take pride when she and her mother had the same favorite ice cream flavor, or liked the same movie; a secret reassurance, essentially, that she was “normal,” even before her father’s mental illness was spelled out for her as a pathology. 

Franny won’t ever have that luxury, having never met her dad, having had her mother vanish during her formative years. Carrie’s mother abandoned her, it’s true, but at least she left her with eighteen years worth of memories and a clear path in front of her: Princeton, international travel, public service. She doesn’t talk about her mother with anyone, not even to Maggie, and especially not now, when the obvious conclusion anyone would make would be _Oh, so that’s why you burned down your entire life. Your mother didn’t love you enough._ Or even, _Your mother didn’t love you so you couldn’t love your daughter_. 

But although it’s true about her mother, that doesn’t explain anything by itself; her relationship with the woman who chose not to be her parent is necessary, but not sufficient, to express why she’s been exiled from her country and is in bed with a Russian agent. She’s not sure anyone would believe her, but she burned down her entire life in service of her daughter, to create a better world, to prevent another endless war.

There’s no way she can explain this to a five-year-old, or even to Maggie, who hasn’t ever quite understood her; it’s a big enough challenge to articulate it to herself. Yevgeny has hinted that a few months down the line, he’ll be able to arrange contact with Maggie, likely via a letter, with no guarantee of safely getting anything in return. Carrie shrugged off the suggestion when he first made it, and she still doesn’t think she’ll take him up on it. There’s too much buried for a letter, not to mention one that could get intercepted.

She thinks more often about Franny, and how she doesn’t want her daughter to grow up without knowing her parents. She trusts Maggie with her emotional life, to remind Franny that Carrie loves her, but not her professional life. Carrie wants to tell Franny why she had to leave in her own words, and she wants her to know more about her father than whatever military-hero-turned-bad nonsense Maggie saw on the news, or heard secondhand from Saul. 

“So I’ve been thinking,” she feigns breeziness to Yevgeny one night as she’s getting dressed after a shower.

“Yes?” he asks distractedly as he walks up behind her, kissing her bare shoulder.

She pulls away from him, pulling a clean t-shirt shirt over her head so he pays attention to what she’s saying. “I’ve been thinking about a project for awhile, something that will let me tell the truth about why I left the US.”

Yevgeny stands back, his eyes alert. “What kind of project?” 

“I’m pretty sure it’s a book. If I’m really in exile here, I need to make it worthwhile,” she explains. “I need to write about everything that’s fucked up about the CIA so that people know about it. So maybe there’ll be real change. So people know who I am and why I betrayed my country.” 

He smiles at this, nodding approvingly. “That sounds like a perfect idea.” 

Carrie grins too. “I have so much work to do,” she whispers almost to herself, inspired, eager, ready to atone.

A book, of course, also has the added benefit of being a perfect cover to shield her from suspicion, to finally shake her Russian surveillance detail and set her up to develop assets. If she has to destroy every remaining shred of goodwill she has with the US intelligence community, at least she can benefit from it later. 

And wasn’t that what Saul taught her, that the long game was the most important thing above all else? That self-sacrifice was worthwhile if you later had something to show for it?

Carrie just hopes that one day Franny will understand.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is a line from If I Wrote You by Dar Williams.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
